Gold Country

The sadness had blown in that summer from nowhere. I was sitting on a yellow couch. The couch was velvet, and so deep that my knees stuck up over my waist. I was in a café in Montana. This was during a time in my life in which nothing much was going on.

“I’m sorry?” I asked, because a voice had spoken to me.

It was a man, sitting on the other side of a coffee table. A large potted plant covered his face. He opened a gap in the leaves. “I understand this is an abnormal question.”

“What’s an abnormal question?”

“I asked whether you had a treasure hunter’s spirit.”

“Well,” I said. “Yeah. I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. I have a treasure hunter’s spirit.”

The man looked relieved. He leaned back; the leaves covered his face again. All I could see was his torso and his hands folded in his lap.

“Saying ‘hello’ doesn’t suffice,” he said. “I’m right across from you. It’s normal for us to have a conversation. ‘Hello’ just doesn’t do it. My neighbors, for example. All they ever say to me is ‘hello.’ Ten years and they’ve never gone beneath the surface.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “That’s a shame.”

“It is a shame. It’s a damn shame.” He looked at the folder on my lap. “What are you working on?”

“A presentation,” I lied. The truth was embarrassing. It was a novel draft.

“Nice. I’m coding. I’m developing a game, a treasure hunt. To teach kids geology.”

I blew ripples across the surface of my coffee. “That’s interesting,” I said. I pulled the pen from behind my ear, looked down at my manuscript. It was a doomed project.

“There are so few treasures left in this world,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“I do know of one,” he said.

It seemed I might be experiencing a call to adventure. I sighed and set my manuscript on the table. I waited for him to go on.

“Right up near Lolo Pass,” he said, faceless, from behind the greenery.

I rubbed my eyes. “Is this a timeshare or something?”

He tore the leaves from in front of his face. “I’m talking about a vein of gold a hundred yards long. A lost mine. A seam so rich it causes magnetic anomalies.” He shut his laptop. “The Nez Perce elders, they know. Books have been written about it. Old Isaac’s mine. In the ’70s a man died trying to reach it. His excavator tipped and bam, got crushed. So that’s why I’m asking: do you have a treasure hunter’s spirit?”

When I was a boy, I experienced something in the manner of an awakening. It was an October night, dark, and I was alone in my room, on my bed, reading The Hobbit, and it seemed at any moment that there would come a knock at the door and a party of dwarves would be piled outside, because my door would have been marked: this boy has a treasure hunter’s spirit. It’s possible this awakening came even earlier. I noticed very young that when I slept on my left side, I could hear, faintly, as my eyes grew heavy, a slow rhythmic thump, as if from far away but also impossibly close, inside me. I imagined this was the chugging of a distant train, on its slow, inevitable track, come to take me away. I realized later this was my heart.

I looked at the man very seriously, and the café seemed to quiet around us. “I really do have a treasure hunter’s spirit,” I said, and I told him this story:

I was born in gold country. My fourth-grade class took a trip to Coloma, where James Marshall first spied a sparkle in the American River. One hundred and fifty years later, we bunked on the riverbank and spent our mornings panning for gold and our afternoons hiking hills twisted over with oak and manzanita. At night, we had story time. Bonfire in a shaded grotto. The camp leader stood before a hunk of granite two men tall, his shadow flung up against it. He orated, and his voice was the sound of the river and the West. There was still gold, only in these late days it was hidden. The flecks we found we kept in vials tied with leather around our necks. I watched those shreds twirl in the vial’s water, shimmering. I thought I’d struck it rich. How could something so beautiful not be worth a fortune? I have always been dominated by fantasy.

The final night, a chaperone found me on the riverbank. Moonlight flickered on black rapids. I was sleepwalking, ankle-deep in an eddy, muttering, “Where’s my gold? Where’s my gold?”

The man leaned back once more. Green fronds rushed back over his face. He crossed his arms. That is how I remember him. A torso and legs on a couch, arms held together, his face a patchwork of leaves. “It’s in your blood,” he told me. “I’m really quite moved.”

Behind him hung a painting of an alpine landscape. Something you’d see at a thrift store and buy for the frame. The mountain was capped with snow and rose to an impossible height. Elk drank from a still blue lake. A Native American in a feather headdress pointed into the distance, directing the implied perspectives: a white painter, a white man in a coffee shop. Gold. A distillation of the landscape, hidden in its folds. One is offered very few opportunities to penetrate the surface of things. To seize the treasure behind the world.

The evening prior, I had sat at a kitchen table, smoking a joint and watching my friends play chess. It was a bungalow in the North Hills and the window was open to the breeze and the reddening grass. They frowned at the board, clicked pieces, sighed, drummed the table. I blew smoke over their heads. Roscoe Holcomb was on the speaker. It pleased me to think this was something my literary idols might have done, but it was also a lonely, quiet feeling, and sad. I forget who won. One of our professors claimed to know the location of Ed Abbey’s grave. It was deep, deep in the wilderness, he’d say. We talked about Richard Hugo, the venerated poet and father of our writing program. When I was accepted, I bought a used copy of Hugo online. Inside was a photograph of mountains at dawn. They rise, snowclad, out of a frozen lake. It was taken on the 15^th of February, 1997. Eight days before my birth. I had a Coors Lite to sober up, then drove home to my wife. She slept beside me. The window was open. As cars passed, their headlights shone on the ceiling, yellow rhombuses stretching and pulling. A hot wind rattled the trees. We’re divorced now.

“So you know where this place is?” I asked the leaves.

“I do.”

“Why haven’t you found it?”

“I don’t have the equipment.”

“I don’t either.”

“I have other places we could find gold. Up off German Gulch Road, past Fairmont Hot Springs. I have a claim on Nine Mile Creek.”

“So why’d you tell me about the big one?”

“You’re the one who said you had a treasure hunter’s spirit,” he said, reaching around, fondling the leaves which covered his face. “Maybe you’ll be the one to find it. How was I supposed to know you were a writer? You could’ve been rich, for all I knew.”

I sighed. “Do you actually know where it is?”

“Yes.”

“If it’s famous, why don’t more people know about it?”

My friend’s father built a machine he claimed could peer through the ice and rock on Mount Ararat, where he was sure he would find the ruin of Noah’s Ark, proving the claims of Christianity. It wasn’t there. So the jury is still out, I suppose.

“My family has been here for generations,” he said. “I’ve been reading every book on the lost mine since I was a kid. I’ve combed all the documents. I know where it is.”

“So why are you telling me, then?”

“Just forget about it,” he said moodily.

These things slip away so easily. I thought again about my trip to gold country. When I returned from Coloma, I experienced the most profound gloom of my life. I took a shower and went outside. I lay on the patio, on a big white cushion. I held a linen pillow over my face. Crying felt very good. The swimming pool sent worms of light wriggling on the walls. I clutched the vial of gold around my neck, but back home, it seemed worthless. I thought about Lauren, my camp crush. I loved her. I wanted to die. The world was so bright and real. To this day it is the same gloom that strangles me at kitchen tables, in cafés, in the eyes of women and in the pages of my manuscripts. I do not know what love is.

“Do you think you could really find it?” I asked. My heart was beating. I could hear that old train—close, so close.

For the final time he let go of the plant. The leaves rushed back over his face, and he was a headless man, a voice from the bush. “Yes,” he said.

I believed him, this glitter in the bedrock. I had to.